Do you REALLY need hard links?

[John Macdonald]

In article <3718 at zorba.Tynan.COM> jrg at Apple.COM (John R. Galloway Jr.) writes:
|I am interested to know what uses people routinely have for hard links that
|could not be equally well served by symbolic links.

In a system administration reporting package we sell, we regularily
use hard links to link todays report to "Rpt.<day>" where <day> is the
day of the week.  Thus we end up with rpt.last being the most recent
report generated, and Rpt.Wed being the report most recently generated
on a Wednesday.  This gives an automatic cyclic backup scheme.  The
<day> extension is generated by using date, and is controlled by an
locally configurable environment variable which allows the numerical
day of the month to be used instead to provide a 28 to 31 day cycle
rather than a seven day cycle.  It would be possible to do the same
with a loop that moved all historical items to the next older name,
however, it is a lot easier to figure out which is the backup from
last Saturday (is it rpt---- or rpt-----?) using our method.
-- 
Algol 60 was an improvment on most           | John Macdonald
of its successors - C.A.R. Hoare             |   jmm at eci386